Undoing Fear and Loathing

When I found out that I was pregnant with a girl, I cried.  
I didn't want to have a girl.  Girls hate their mothers.  
I wouldn't be able to screw up a boy.  Girls are so complicated.  
They hate their mothers and are embarrassed by them when they become teenagers.  What would I do with a girl?  I don't know anything about being a girl, much less how to talk to a girl about being a girl.  Now I have two.  I have tried to get to the root of the mother issue and I have not quite figured it out.   The root is fear and it is a rotten one. 

Once I was an adult, my mother told me  that she was afraid of me when I was a child.  She was 23 when I was born, she was poor and living in the dreary city of Boston and she said she just didn't know what to do with me, so she kind of left me alone.  I can't really get much more out of her than that.  Our family doesn't talk favorably to each others' faces.  They just pass along cryptic messages, like telling my husband that they knew I was special and unique.  They didn't really show me those feelings. 

I am deducing that my daughters are 'special' in the same way.  There is nothing scarier than looking at someone and seeing your own reflection.

I am also afraid of my daughters.  I am afraid that we will not be close, that I will screw them up and that they will have the same hollowness that I feel about femininity and love and accomplishment.  I am afraid that I won't respond in a loving way to the clinging they feel towards me.  I am afraid that I won't be there for them and that they won't know how much I love them.  I am afraid that they won't be able to handle life and one will become despondent or addicted or broken.  I am afraid that these years will slip away because of all of these fears.  

It is all of this fear that will be their un-doing.  

I know from my yoga practice that fear is essentially not knowing your own limitations.  Not knowing your limitless nature from an experiential level.  

I want to be perfect somehow and give my daughters what I  did not have.  I put a lot of pressure on myself, and often cannot distinguish between the necessary lessons for growth and the absolute fun of being in a family.   That is not knowing my limitless nature.  I operate under the misperception that I do not have enough love to go around. 

My daughters feel my tension.  As all children feel tension.  Whenever I am strained at the thought of not being enough or of following some rule, or afraid or responding to one and making the other one feel less special, they act out.  I see myself re-creating the tension.  I don't have clear boundaries.  The real key is to know and establish the limitations of time and space and be free with your love.  

My new experience of unconditional love is that I have married someone who, although also sometimes afraid of me, will work with me to grow. I am allowed to push the limits of love and work with him to feel complete. I want to be able to directly model this way of being to my daughters, but  that requires letting go of fear and accepting the truth that it is inevitable, you will make mistakes, but if you do it with love and humor, you will triumph.  

My daughters will have a safe space to triumph over fear, that is my commitment.